for a great event, or a great personality, has not been reached. The swelling of the breast under strong emotion uplifts understanding. Under such influence a writer is to the extent of his faculties on the level of his theme. As for biography, I would no more attempt to write that of a man for whom I felt no warm admiration, than I would maintain friendship with one for whom I had no affection. Doubtless there also was in Pitt's manner of speech, in the cast of his sentences,--the style that is the man himself,--something which appealed especially to me. Often, when reading in the Public Library of New York a passage of unusual eloquence, I would be strongly moved to rise on the spot and give three cheers; and I heartily subscribed to a Latin motto on the title-page of the edition I was using: If you could but have heard himself. But it was more than that. The story increasingly impressed itself upon me. I saw him conscious of great capacities for the administration of peace, an inner conviction of far less ability for war; with a vision of Great Britain happy and prosperous beyond all past experience under his enlightened guidance, of which already the plans had been revealed and proof been given, and over against this the palpable reality of a current too powerful to be resisted, sweeping her into a conflict, the end of which, amid such unprecedented conditions, could not be foreseen. Also, despite all his deficiencies for a war ministry, as I read and studied the general features of the situation with which he had to deal, I became convinced that the broad lines of his policy coincided with the military necessities of the case, to an extent that he himself very possibly did not realize. For as the Directory outlined Napoleon's Continental System, so Pitt, unknowingly perhaps, pursued the methods, as he definitely predicted the means--exhaustion--by which his successors brought to a stop the mischievous energies of France under the great emperor.